


Tabula Rasa

by revise_leviathan



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Brainwashing/Memory Erasure, Gen, Headcanon, Speculation, spoilers up to episode 46 preview
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 22:30:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3427880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revise_leviathan/pseuds/revise_leviathan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yuri began just like any other Yuya counterpart; a sweet kid with a dragon and a close friend who just so happened to have a dimension-warping bracelet. But sweet kids might not stay sweet when you start them over from a blank slate.</p>
<p>Mostly pre-canon, based on a personal headcanon/expectation that Yuri isn't going to be truly evil but rather manipulated or brainwashed and the canon fact that the Akabas can memory wipe people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tabula Rasa

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been planning an Arc-V AU recently and it's got me thinking a lot about Yuri (as well as accidentally shipping Yuri/Selena whoops) and the headcanon I already had that he was going to be basically a nice guy either brainwashed, traumatised or memory-tampered. That combined with a few hours to kill late at night resulted in this.

His name is Yuri, he is fourteen years old, and that’s all he can be sure of anymore.  
He can feel himself falling to his knees on the torn-up stone, remaining Life wiped out by one of the dragons just like his own, and someone is shouting at him. About a Yuzu, about a Ruri, about someone he can’t quite hear because his brain feels like it just wants to give up.  
And then he starts up again, because he hears the voice shout a name he recognises, right at his core. Selena.  
His mind gives out, and everything comes flooding back in.

\--

With no family to speak of and nothing to say for himself except his impressive duelling record, Yuri comes to the Academia at the age of eight. They poke fun at him, for everything from his fluffy pink eyebrows to his purple cabbage hair, until he beats them soundly one by one, and the ridicule evolves over the course of a year into respect. Respect wasn’t what he needed, though. It never had been.

At nine years old, another child of around his age comes to the Academia, and she issues him a challenge almost immediately upon hearing his reputation. They fight. They tie. They become friends. She tells him her name is Selena, and her blue hair shines like the moon and like the star on her beautiful bracelet, which tinkles and chimes whenever she’s near. It eases his loneliness, and for the first time since coming to Academia, he smiles like he used to.  
By the time he turns ten, he duels for fun again, letting his opponents creep up on him before turning the tables, congratulating them on a match well-played with a smile warm enough to light the audience’s hearts. But in that year, Selena disappears, and the murmurs begin. Rumbles of invasion, of Xyz and Synchro Dimensions that pose some kind of threat to their continued existence, but never Standard, he realises, now it’s all back at once. Standard was never the one they expected to overthrow them. He shrinks away again, and he starts to fumble his plays here, there, not enough to look deliberate, but enough to drop him down the ranks of the Academia’s students. This is war, and he wants no part in it, but he never tells them as much. He doesn’t dare.

When he reaches eleven, he makes the worst mistake of his life. He asks where Selena is, and they don’t respond, those soldiers of the Academia, but they seize and become paranoid around him, and he feels like the very fact that he ever knew Selena is putting them both in danger. He keeps slipping down the ladder, trying to hide from sight, trying to pretend he’d never been worth anything in the first place, and he thinks it worked until the day Leo Akaba himself requests his presence after a particularly abysmal duel.  
The Professor, as they call him, is an imposing man in his regal purple and red, and when he asks Yuri what became of the promise he’d always shown, Yuri is too scared to tell the truth, but too scared to lie either. It’s not until Leo says _her_ name that everything he’s been hiding since her disappearance bursts forth, and he blames Leo and he blames all of them for taking her away. He tells them that he didn’t come here for war, that duels are meant to be _harmless_ and _fun_ and wonders when everyone here forgot that. And Leo smiles, a strange little smile it is, and says that if those are his troubles, they can take them away.

Yuri refuses, but the Obelisk Force are everywhere, and he gets no more than three steps out the door and halfway through a scream for someone, anyone, _Selena, please help me_ , before nameless hands seize his struggling arms and seal his traitorous mouth. Squirming and protesting unintelligibly through the hand gagging him, he’s dragged back through hallways upon labyrinthine hallways, to rooms he’s never seen before, and suddenly, they’re passing another squad of two or three. She’s grown so big but they’re carrying _Selena_ , fighting them every step of the way, but as she sees him her eyes widen in anger and horror, and as his cry for her is smothered into nothing more than a pitiful moan of fear and sadness, she jerks violently, pulling one arm away just long enough to reach out for him. It’s so _close_ , and he twists one arm and pulls like he’ll never have another chance to, and it’s just one arm but it’s _free_ , and their fingers lace through each other for a second before it breaks and they’re separated. He can hear Selena screaming for answers and for freedom and for _Yuri’s_ freedom too, and knowing that she still cares for him is just making everything hurt more, but it’s only a matter of a few more seconds before they pull him into a cold room with steel doors and _something_ in the middle of it that looks like a cross between a computer and a torture chair. He doesn’t know what it is, but he knows he doesn’t want anything to do with it, and he yanks and bites and screams until they push a mask over his face and he inhales something that’s definitely not oxygen.

As he fades, he wonders if he’ll ever wake up.

\--

Muzzily, Yuri blinks himself awake. His eyes feel like they were glued shut, and the room he’s in is unfamiliar. Standing by the window is an imposing man in red and purple, and Yuri’s first thought is how impressive he looks. How this man is someone he could be like.

The man asks him if he knows who he is, or where he is. Yuri shakes his head. Strangely, he can’t remember anything from before he came here, but his chest feels weak and fluttery, so he guesses it was something scary. The room he’s in is beautiful, though, and this man seems kind in his words as he explains that Yuri is in a place called Academia, a school for very special and skilled children like him. Yuri asks for his parents, and the man’s face grows solemn.  
A trick. Children who looked like him, from places called Xyz and Synchro, fooled them all and took away his family. Yuri can barely breathe for shock and rage, and when the man – introducing himself by no other name than the Professor – asks if he will help him fight these dimensions, Yuri agrees without question. The Professor nods, as if this was the most satisfying answer he could have given.

By the time his twelfth birthday passes, he’s been on the front lines and back again. The Professor had pushed him hard against the Obelisk Force, the Academia’s chosen few, and one by one, he had beaten them all and taken his place in the Xyz invasion. There’s a ruthless pride in making these people, these cowards who stole away everything he loved, cringe and stutter in mindless fear, and he finds himself, sometimes, enjoying it. The smile he doesn’t remember wearing in duels turns harsh, cruel and prideful, and the handful that escape him never forget it.

He’s worried when the Professor calls him back, as if he might have failed in some miniscule way, something that makes him unworthy to fight. On the contrary, he is presented with a uniform as regal and unique as the Professor’s own, and he is given a mission; to take from those who took from him. The ones who look like him are accompanied by girls who look like someone else from Academia; he is shown a picture, and something about it makes his heart skip. Those sharp green eyes stare into him, and the bracelet on her wrist seems to chime even without being there, but the Professor tells him that the others have bracelets too and suddenly the memory withers and the chime dies. He promises he will not fail.

On the way out, he passes someone in the halls, and she calls to him. He turns to her, that predatory smirk playing around his mouth, and the girl from the picture – Selena, the Professor called her – freezes like he’s a ghost come back to haunt her.  
 _“Yuri…”_ she whispers, in absolute horror. _“What have they done to you?”_  
He laughs; small, controlled, fist just brushing against his lower lip, and replies, _“Xyz? Synchro? They took something very special from me. Now I’ll merely be returning the favour.”_  
Before she can argue, pursuing footsteps echo down the hall, and he gives a mocking little bow as she flees, casting one last look back at him.

He can’t quite explain why he feels he should catch up to her.

\--

The Synchro girl is a cinch, with that dimension out of the war _for now_ , and though the boy from that dimension who looks like him – she calls him Yugo, and Yuri can’t help but giggle humourlessly at the irony of that – pursues them, Yuri planned for this, and leaves one pathetic Rank 1 Xyz Monster card for him to find. The rampaging dragon in his deck box, which he’s had for longer than he can really remember, insists that he stay and fight, but he ignores it, barely. There would be time for that later, after all. He takes the girl to the Professor, kicking and swearing, and she is taken off his hands. Something about the way they drag her off gives him déjà vu, but he can’t for the life of him figure out why.

He doesn’t find the Xyz girl until he’s turned thirteen, and it takes him another few months to plan around the fact that she’s part of the Xyz Resistance, along with her hawk-eyed older brother and the calm, morose lookalike of himself, who never seem to leave her alone. In his reconnaissance, he learns her name is Ruri Kurosaki, the brother is Shun, and the lookalike Yuto, names he only really files away out of necessity, in case he comes across them again. War is war, though, unpredictable and messy, and the day Ruri is separated from the other two is the day he strikes, helmeted and dressed in white like the boy from Synchro was. He lets them catch sight of him with the Academia guard before he vanishes with Ruri and, after a thought, drops a pin from Standard’s LDS into the dust. No such thing as too much misdirection.

By the time he turns fourteen, he is the Academia’s most accomplished specialist soldier, deployed only when necessary and to devastating effect. He watches as Sora Shiun’in is deployed and recalled, going from calm and confident to screaming for blood, the blood of _Shun Kurosaki_ , that name once again, and Yuri’s cruel smile returns at the thought of a job well done. But Sora’s arrival brings one last call from the Professor, and it’s another of those jobs Yuri enjoys so much now. One last girl who looks like Selena, this one from Standard and named Yuzu Hiiragi, needs to be collected, and Yuri is eager to come face-to-face with the people of this last dimension, the original dimension. He is told in passing that Selena is there too, and if possible, to bring her back as well, as Sora’s loss to a mere Xyz user has irreparably marred his reliability. He departs immediately, but chooses to lie in wait; he knows Standard has been compromised, and needs to gauge how that will affect his mission. It doesn’t take him long to come face to face with both of his targets, though, still talking about the _terror_ of the Xyz invasion.

He asks them politely, and then he moves to duel them, but he is interrupted by the last of the ones that look like him, a boy with that kind of crushed, tired expression that came to those whose naïveté had been freshly shattered. He puts up a fight, but Yuri is wary and ready while this boy is barely standing and still reeling from something Yuri can’t place, but probably has something to do with him playing the Xyz boy’s – Yuto’s – dragon on his final turn before Yuri puts him out of his misery. He’s just about to seal the boy – he’d make a fine trophy, at least – when Yuzu stands between them and offers Yuri a compromise. To save the boy, calling him Yuya, she agrees to go without a fight. Yuya’s protests are barely audible and no more coherent in his semi-conscious state, but Yuzu’s mind is made up, and Yuri settles for rolling Yuya’s prone form down the fissure at the centre of the volcano area, coming to a stop halfway between the cliff and the lava. He watches idly as Yuzu begs Selena to run, knowing that the rest of the Obelisk Force are on their way, and as she sees them herself and knows she cannot leave without a fight, Selena turns to him again.

Once more, she asks why he’s doing this, what they’ve done to him. They used to be friends, remember?

No, he doesn’t, but he tries to hide the way his stomach twists almost hard enough to make him vomit at the realisation.

\--

When Yuya confronts him again, he looks a little more whole, but Yuri’s taunts and barbs wear him down until his demeanour visibly changes to something more like that of the Xyz lookalike, and then to something brutal and violent that entertains Yuri like nothing else, until the tides start turning and Yuri finds himself losing harder than he ever has. Face scored by flying debris as the Pendulum and Xyz dragons come in for the kill, he whites out for a second as he smashes into a wall, and something in his mind, the veil that had clouded it since that day he’d woken up in Academia, comes loose.

\--

“Yuri…? Come _on_ , please, I didn’t mean to hurt you this badly, just please don’t be…”  
Yuri snaps back to consciousness, chest heaving, and Yuya’s face morphs into momentary relief, then concern.  
“Yuri?”  
“I…I…” He can’t manage any more than that. This _thing_ that he’d become, that they’d turned him into, he can’t reconcile with what he knows now. Yuya seems to understand, and a solemn look comes over his face as Yuri’s expression creeps slowly to utter horror. The cruel notes fall away from his voice, and as he speaks again, he sounds more like that scared little boy he’d pretended to be once than anything else.

“Selena… _damn it_ , Selena, forgive me…”

He reaches out for support, or even just contact, _something_ to ground him, and Yuya curls around him protectively as he chokes on his words, and tears settle like rain on the collar of his uniform.


End file.
